The 5 battery chemistries expected to matter through the 2030s, and the reason for each

Lithium iron phosphate wins on cost

A battery cathode is the electrode inside a cell that sets its cost, its safety, and how much energy it can hold. A 2026 sustainability study scored 5 lithium cathodes on manufacturing cost and found lithium iron phosphate, called LFP, the cheapest at 90 dollars per kilowatt hour, against 145 dollars for the most expensive chemistry it measured, lithium cobalt oxide. LFP already holds more than 60% of the electric vehicle battery market in China, the largest electric vehicle market in the world.

The shared constraint behind every chemistry on this list

Every chemistry on this list answers the same shortage. A study modeled the passenger vehicle fleet in China out to 2050 and found that a large scale shift to LFP like chemistries can cut cumulative cobalt and nickel demand by more than half, yet lithium and graphite demand are still projected to reach 4 to 19 times their 2019 levels by 2050, even under conservative assumptions. The car industry in China alone could need 548,000 metric tons of cobalt a year by then, equal to 7.7% of global cobalt reserves consumed in a single year.

Manganese solves what plain LFP does not

Lithium manganese iron phosphate, called LMFP, prices second cheapest in the same study, at 100 dollars per kilowatt hour, and solves a materials problem plain LFP does not fully address.

Lithium-based batteries power our daily lives from consumer electronics to national defense.

Jennifer M Granholm, Secretary of Energy, United States Department of Energy. Source 5.

A 2021 blueprint from the United States Department of Energy sets a 2030 goal to eliminate cobalt and nickel from lithium ion batteries, and names manganese as the material most able to replace them. The reserve table in that blueprint lists United States manganese reserves at 230,000 thousand metric tons, about 4,340 times the 53 thousand metric tons of cobalt the country holds, a gap wide enough to explain why LMFP earns a place on this list.

High nickel NMC keeps a smaller, premium role

Ternary batteries, chemistries that combine nickel and cobalt with a third metal, held 40% of the electric vehicle battery market in China in 2023. By 2025 that had fallen to about 20%, while LFP alone passed 60%.

High nickel nickel manganese cobalt, called NMC811, scores well behind LFP and LMFP in the same sustainability study, largely because of its nickel and cobalt content, and it costs 44% more than LFP per kilowatt hour. What keeps it on the list is energy density, how much energy a battery packs into each kilogram it weighs. NMC811 is the cathode most often paired with the newest solid state cells, batteries that swap the liquid material moving charge inside a normal lithium ion cell for a solid one. Those cells reach energy densities no liquid electrolyte lithium ion cell sold today can match.

Sodium ion and solid state, one funded, one still a record

Sodium ion batteries replace the lithium that moves inside a cell with sodium. A life cycle study places sodium ion at technology readiness level 7 to 8, meaning full cell prototypes are already qualified for production rather than confined to a lab, and names a planned annual production capacity of 30 gigawatt hours from BYD. Solid state lithium metal cells reach the highest energy density named in the sources for this article, 446 watt hours per kilogram in a single laboratory pouch cell, above what production lithium ion cells reach today. The same study that scored the other 4 chemistries on cost says commercial, at scale solid state cells are no closer than 2030.

In the next twenty years, it will be less about discovering completely new chemistries and more about carefully managing the difficult trade-offs.

The study, the 2026 sustainability framework that scored all 5 cathodes on cost. Source 1.